User talk:Blackdog
Welcome to the Campaigns Wikia! Our mission is for this wiki to be a central meeting ground for everyone who believes it is time for politics to become more participatory. We're at the start of an era of net-driven participatory politics and I'm glad you're here to help with that. If you've not yet signed up for the mailing list, I encourage you to join the conversation there. If you're a blogger, please add yourself to the list if you haven't already. If you need any help, see our editing tutorial, and feel free to contact me with any problems. We'd love it if you could blog about this wiki and continue to edit here and encourage others to do the same. -- sannse (talk) 18:59, 6 July 2006 (UTC) NPOV, Wikipedia and Campaign Wikia style I think some people take the NPOV principle of Wikipedia and apply it to Campaign, they also want to transform the articles in some kind of duplicates of Wikipedia pages. What is your opinion in this matter, what do you think articles should look like? Signed opinions or an appearance of consensus (where actually people with more editing power and endurance will silence dissenting opinions) or you tossed the coin and now you wait for it to stop spinning... -- Blackdog 03:06, 7 July 2006 (UTC) I just wrote something relevant to this at . In short, I think it is absolutely important to separate the two kinds of pages. A discussion page is a discussion page. An article page is an article page. There is no place in a wiki for article pages with signed opinions, because the article pages are supposed to be a somewhat eternal document, and discussion pages are fluid. This does not mean that neutrality is the only possible rule. I can imagine on many topics we may need to have 3 (or maybe more) articles, a neutral statement of the problem that people can all agree upon, then an objective statement of various points of view. The important thing is that people of good faith of differing viewpoints can agree to contribute to the pages as written. No hijacking of pages for to rant for a particular point of view, see. And finally, I think it is very very important that we do not allow this site to become yet another forum for idiots to flame each other. The Internet is full of those. What we seek to do is to come together in a nonpartisan spirit of kindness to think about how to make the entire process of politics more participatory. If you are here to tell people how bad the Republicans are, or how bad the Democrats are, well, hmmmm... best to not work in the central campaigns site, but rather start up a campaign site for a particular politicians and work there only with like minded people. But if you are here to think about how the process of politics can be made better all around... then I think you will agree with me that we should try for articles which are quiet, reasoned, and thoughtful, rather than polemical... for the most part at least. Finally, this is an experiment. So let's try to be relaxed for a while before anything is set into stone. This always works much better, I think. --Jimbo Wales 03:13, 7 July 2006 (UTC) After I wrote the above, I had one more thought. In my experience, if you have people of good will seriously trying for neutrality, it really is not at all the way that wikis function in practice that "people with more editing power and endurance will silence dissenting opinions". I have seen many cases of conservatives working to defend a liberal opinion, or liberals working to defend a conservative opinion... this works when both sides value honest debate over points scoring. Some people are not good at that. And they won't find wikis very comfortable, and will soon retreat back to the safety of a blog. ;-) --Jimbo Wales 03:16, 7 July 2006 (UTC)